Data has become a bar of gold for businesses of various scales. Small businesses dive into a functional analysis of existing processes and introduce improvements based on numbers.
The best of them go further – they predict trends, likely changes on the market, and the effects of management decisions that have not yet been made using the possibilities offered by technical solutions. BigQuery is rightly in question among them right now.
Let’s overview this solution and explore why entrepreneurs should think of using BigQuery.
Where did it come from?
The origins of BigQuery date back to 2006, when Google launched the first version of the Dremel engine, a tool capable of running large assets of data fast and tidily. The software has become an important solution in the processing of information queues for BigQuery. As a public service, BigQuery made its debut in 2011. Since then, it has been constantly developed by Google engineers.
In short, we can say that Google BigQuery is a Structured Query Language (SQL) database-oriented to analyze large volumes of data. It allows handling millions of queries without having to worry about the costly maintenance of advanced infrastructure.
With the help of the service, you can create your own set of analytical methods to track data and processes taking place inside or around the company. For example, if you’re using payment processors and want to analyze all the financial data, BigQuery will help here as well.
The tool allows you to build a system that will help you with data analysis greatly. BigQuery can also help you optimize the performance and maintenance costs of your existing data analysis system.
What are the benefits of using BigQuery?
While all of that sounds very exciting, the real business benefits of the platform still remain unclear. So let’s analyze its main advantages:
It uses serverless technology
BigQuery is a cloud data warehouse. By using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services, you can focus on scaling your business and getting the best out of your analytics. There is no need to spend additional time and budget on infrastructure maintenance, updating, or ensuring an adequate level of server security.
That is why it performs an automatic backup and stores the history of changes for 7 days. Thanks to this, you can easily compare the results with the previous period or restore the data.
It provides instant analysis
BigQuery needs seconds to process terabytes of data and about 3 minutes for one petabyte to process. Warehouses process large data sets even several dozen times faster than database systems. You can observe the changes ‘live’ in real-time.
It has a reasonable price
The cost of the BigQuery service adjusts to your business requirements. As with the GCP itself, you pay solely for the utilization. Data storage costs $20 per 1TB. Data processing costs $5 per 1TB, and the first terabyte of each month is free. For small businesses, it’s a very affordable deal since they don’t usually have enterprise-size data sets to process.
You don’t need to interfere with the source code
BigQuery doesn’t require major changes to the source code to use. This is due to the fact that BigQuery supports the ANSI SQL:2016 standard and provides open programming interfaces free of charge.
You can analyze data from various sources
With BigQuery, you can retrieve data from various sources:
- Google Marketing Platform
- Google Analytics
- YouTube
- your website
- hundreds of external SaaS applications
Data can also be transferred to BigQuery from non-GCP infrastructure solutions if you, let’s say, store it on task management software.
It has Machine Learning support
BigQuery ML function is dedicated to creating and developing machine learning capabilities using standard SQL queries. BigQuery ML increases the speed of product development with machine learning while reducing the requirements for writing source code and moving data.
It has a Business Intelligence (BI) tool
The service allows you to analyze huge data sets and create extensive reports within seconds. It also supports the creation of ‘ad hoc’ reports that include a certain slice of data and do not require the involvement of the analytical or IT department to prepare a working summary.
Why should entrepreneurs consider using it?
Imagine you built an eCommerce store, for example, on Shopify or WooCommerce. All data on user behavior, inventory data, vital CRM statistics, and many other sources should be collected and analyzed. You see the whole picture and make conscious decisions, performance reports, and whatever else smoothly. All those processes can be done with the help of Google BigQuery.
While the platform has been known to analytics for a long time, entrepreneurs sometimes neglect it or consider it too complicated. Yes, perhaps, you would need a data analyst to perform all the processes with data in BigQuery effectively.
However, many solutions will ease the use of BigQuery for you and make the experience smooth. Here you can choose any BigQuery integration that will provide the sources you need and is optimal in terms of price and functionality. Eventually, you’ll
have all the data in a convenient place, collected and ready to be analyzed and visualized.
Some prominent cases of BigQuery help in business are Safari Books Online, Dow Jones, and UPS. For example, UPS collects data on thousands of shipments every day – including their weight, dimensions, and location. Thanks to the possibility of machine learning and data analysis, the company can flawlessly determine how to load vans or containers to increase efficiency as much as possible.
From above, BigQuery and tools in combination can help your business gather and analyze all the data essential for revenue, marketing, growth, finances, or even launched website. These can be used to increase your business’s cost-effectiveness, optimize organizational processes, and leverage marketing efforts.
In any case, whether your main motivation is simply wanting to know and test some cloud data warehouse or having some experience with Amazon Redshift and Google Analytics, you consider choosing among the best cloud computing providers, starting with BigQuery will be a good idea.
Sum up
Broadening your horizons and using new tools can improve the information efficiency of a business. Especially if you already know how your data can benefit you but lack the right infrastructure solutions. Effective market reports help you understand how to increase your revenue and what weaknesses you need to look out for.
But in order for reports to truly be trusted, you need to be confident in the quality, accuracy, and completeness of the data. There you get the BigQuery platform you don’t want to miss.
